In recent years, the employment of directional antennas in ad hoc networks has significantly increased. MAC protocols for ad hoc networks with directional antennas have the potentiality of spatial reuse, large coverage range and network capacity, which mitigates the negative effects associated with omnidirectional antenna systems. However, they suffer from some issues such as hidden terminal problems, deafness, neighbor discovery, flaws with directional carrier sensing, etc. In this paper, we have surveyed the MAC protocols for ad hoc networks with directional antennas, which have been published in the literature, and compared them qualitatively in terms of major characteristics and network performances.